Veal Loaf
Wipe three pounds of lean veal, discarding all skin and tissue. Pass meat through the meat-chopper twice, with one-half pound of salt pork; add six crackers rolled, one-fourth cup cream, juice of one small lemon (about two tablespoons), one tablespoon salt, one-half tablespoon black pepper, onion juice to taste. Mix thoroughly and pack solidly in a granite, brick-shaped bread pan, spread top evenly and brush with slightly beaten white of egg. Bake in a moderate oven three hours, basting often with one-fourth cup of pork fat or dripping diluted with one-fourth cup boiling water. Prick surface with a fork that fat may penetrate meat. Chill, remove to serving platter, surround by any good vegetable salad. If served hot, surround with Tomato, Creole or Espagnole Sauce. This may be prepared Saturday.
A cold-sliced veal loaf built like a pâté, meant to be baked Saturday and served Sunday. Two things need attention: the oven time, and the fact that lean veal has almost no fat of its own.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as about 350F. Three hours is long for a loaf of this size; expect the centre to reach 160F well before that. Use a thermometer and pull it at 160F rather than cooking to the clock, or you will get a dry brick.
- Why the basting mattersLean veal ground with half a pound of salt pork is still a relatively lean mixture by modern meatloaf standards, and the pricking-and-basting routine matters here. Do not skip it, and do not substitute a lean pork cut for the salt pork.
- Granite pan"Granite" means graniteware, enamelled sheet steel, not stone. Any 9x5-inch loaf pan works; enamel or glass browns the sides less aggressively than dark metal.
- Six crackers, rolledPlain soda crackers crushed fine. The crumb yield depends on the cracker; period crackers were generally larger than a modern saltine, so treat the count as approximate. Taste before committing to the full tablespoon of salt, especially with a salty pork.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, about a tablespoon or two. It seasons without leaving raw onion pieces that would weep and loosen the loaf when sliced.
- PepperHalf a tablespoon of black pepper is 1 1/2 teaspoons, which is assertive but deliberate in a cold-served loaf, where seasoning reads flat. Grind it fresh.
- The egg-white glazeBrushed on before baking, it sets into a thin glazed skin on top. Apply it again lightly at the halfway point if the top looks washed out from basting.
- Chilling and yieldCool in the pan, then refrigerate several hours or overnight before turning out; warm, it will crumble under the knife. Three and a half pounds of raw mixture serves eight to ten as a cold main course.
- Espagnole and CreoleBoth are cross-references to sauces elsewhere in the book: Espagnole is the brown veal-stock sauce, Creole a tomato, pepper and onion sauce. Any well-reduced brown sauce or a good tomato sauce serves the same purpose.
Veal loaf belongs to a large family of pressed, chilled meat loaves that filled the cold-supper table in American households, veal being valued precisely because its mild flavour and gelatinous collagen made it set firm when cold. The instruction at the end — "This may be prepared Saturday" — suggests a loaf that improved with a night in the cold room was worth more than a dish that had to be watched. The technique is a domestic descendant of the French pâté and the English potted meat, minus the pastry crust and minus the sealing layer of fat, with the salt pork folded through the mixture instead. Serving it surrounded by a vegetable salad, rather than sliced onto plates, reflects the period's taste for a composed centrepiece platter.